Data is omnipresent. Whether it's a small company employing a few people or a large corporation with thousands of employees, the need to capture, store and manage an organization's data is ever-present. With the development of technology and software tools, such as a data warehouse (DW) system, it has become relatively easier for an enterprise to manage its data.
A data warehouse is a collection of data that is extracted from one or more data sources. For example, a company might create a data warehouse that integrates data from various sources, such as, sales information, customer information, inventory information, product information, etc. The collection may help the company analyze sales figures by location, inventory details by location, customer preferences for its products, etc. A data warehouse allows the management of an enterprise to analyze data related to its organization for business decision making.
In a model driven data warehouse, the data warehouse components and ETL (extract, transform, and load) operations are modeled, generally as an XML (Extensible Markup Language) file compliant to the model. The data warehouse and ETL tasks are typically managed by a job scheduler, which runs these tasks at predefined intervals or specified time of day. In another scenario, such tasks may be event driven rather than time driven.